All Episodes
Previous Next
Plain Text
May 15, 2024 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
56:00
20240515_rafah-invasion-latest-norman-finkelstein-vs-yishai
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|

Time Text
Horror on the Ground 00:01:28
We've seen crushed bodies, children with broken skulls.
I just cannot describe the horror honesty that we have seen so far.
October 7th is an opportunity to clean house and to make sure this doesn't come back again.
The goal right now is not just to mow the lawn in Gaza, but to extirpate, pull out from the roots every blade of grass in Gaza.
Because we're a tiny Jewish state within the Abraham.
We don't defend ourselves, then we're here.
We're an ethnic guard.
Do you believe then you should also be entitled to the whole of Gaza?
Absolutely.
You're a war criminal because you are illegally settling in occupied Palestinian territory.
What right does Israel have to just take over Gaza?
You're not talking today to one of the liberal Jews.
You're not talking to a government spokesman.
Clearly.
You're talking to one of the settlers.
This is where we're from.
This is where we're going to stay.
Nothing is going to get us out.
But the problem is you are sounding genocidal in the sense that you want to get rid of...
Don't put silly words in my mouth.
Well, Dr. Mossad Nasser is the CEO of the American medical charity Fagile Scientific, who is currently working in the European hospital between Khan Yunis and Rafa.
And Dr. Nasser joins me now.
Thank you very much indeed for taking time from what I know is a very, very busy, pressurized time for you there.
Can you just tell me, you've come from the United States, I know.
Evacuating a Safe House 00:07:31
Obviously, when you look at these scenes from afar, they look horrific.
What is the reality like on the ground?
Thank you, Piers, for having me.
The reality, I would say, is very different from the shots you see on TV.
It is a million times worse.
The way I like to describe it to people is like you just had a hurricane, because I'm from Texas, I can talk about hurricanes.
Imagine a hurricane hit a city and then a major earthquake hit it again, followed by a tsunami.
This is the reality on the ground in Gaza.
If you visit Khan Yunis, like how we did in the past couple of days, actually we are in Khan Yunis, I'm between Khan Yunis and Rafa.
We went and visited Khan Yunis and it's just unbelievable.
I just, while looking at the destroyed buildings, I kept asking myself, how can you create and make such destruction in such a record time?
It's just unbelievable.
And in terms of the civilian casualties that you're seeing on a daily basis, what kind of scale are we talking and what kind of injuries?
Everything you can think of.
But the thing that's more heartbreaking is not just civilians, it's families.
So when we talk about civilians, it could be one person from a different family and one here and one there.
But what we've witnessed are entire families wiped out.
Just a couple of days ago, we had a family of seven brought to the European hospital in Gaza here that the federal scientific team worked very hard in trying to treat them and resuscitate one of them.
Three of them actually came to the hospital in a state of, I would say, two were dead, one in a state of death, effectively.
Our team spent about 45 minutes trying to bring someone back to life and unfortunately failed.
One of them came with the head and the entire torso effectively completely crushed, like an 18-wheeler just drove on top of him.
Another one came completely dead with the face completely burnt.
And the mother was following them, screaming.
And I asked her, what's going on?
What happened?
She said, look, we live east of Khan Yunis and we heard the bombing happening close to us in Rafah.
So we decided to evacuate.
Even though she said the area where we live is not considered a red zone.
It's not a war zone.
Relatively safe.
She said, we decided to leave.
We packed our stuff on the back of a car.
And I told my son, as soon as we were ready, I told him to go upstairs, just make sure that all the doors are locked before we leave the house.
And suddenly I see a tank rolling close to the house.
I thought it's just, you know, we'll be safe.
And she said, by the time my son went down, the tank hit the house and several people were killed.
She said, we didn't have cars because there's no gas in Gaza.
So they have one car with gas that she could carry the three, four bodies with her and bring them to the hospital.
Three of them actually died and the other three were seriously injured.
So this is the reality.
We've seen burns, we've seen broken bones, we've seen crushed bodies, children with broken skulls.
I mean, I just cannot describe the horror, honestly, that we have seen so far.
And it's quite likely to get immeasurably worse if there's a full-scale invasion of Rafah.
I know that you were in a safe house with many of your team in Rafah, but you had to evacuate.
Why was that?
We call it the safe house that's no longer safe.
We spent about a week in that house and then, and we were operating at the European hospital, a kind of business as usual, dealing with the casualties and treating people with acute injuries and so on.
But then one week into our stay at that house, we heard that the eastern part of Rafah was under evacuation.
Our house fortunately happened to be in block six in Rafah and it was not in the area that was required to evacuate.
So we thought we are relatively safe.
And this house is considered deconflicted.
So we are known.
Our position is known to the Israeli army and to the organizations that we have come with, primarily the WHO.
It's a deconflicted house.
So we decided to stay.
But in the middle of the night, the bombings that took place within less than 500 meters radius was unbelievable.
The sound, the shaking of the building, like literally in an unbelievable way, just scared the hell out of it.
I mean, the level of terror at night was unbearable for any member of my team.
I have 12 Americans, three Brits, one from Egypt, and one from Oman.
And we've all decided collectively that we're not going to spend the time any nights in this house anymore, even though we did not receive any evacuation orders.
And we all basically came to the European hospital.
And that's where we're staying since then.
Israel insists that it's getting humanitarian aid through, including medical supplies.
What is your experience of that?
Are you getting these medical supplies?
Unfortunately, not.
I can tell you, my team at times feels useless.
Honestly, I have the best of the best in terms of expertise between surgeons, primary care physicians, nurses, wound care specialists.
But sometimes you have an injury coming to the emergency room and you look for basic supplies, as simple as anesthesia medications.
You don't have them.
Blood, you don't have it.
Basic, basic wound care supplies, you don't have it.
And one thing Piers that really struck everybody on the team is that the Palestinians seem to operate at a frequency that's different from the emergency teams in the West.
It's basically rationing of resources.
Sometimes you have an injury that's coming to the hospital, and they say, we can't do anything about it.
The way we think, the way in America thinks, like, let's do whatever we can to save their life or his or her life.
And we've seen this multiple times.
We try our best.
We basically use, consume resources.
For them, it's a waste because he is dead.
Just don't spend time.
So this reminds me of COVID time, right?
Even though he still has a chance of survival, they decide not to work much on him or her because that's a waste of resources.
As I said, this reminds me of COVID time when people at the hospitals in America and Europe and around the world were saying, this patient has the right or the chance of survival.
So let's put him on or her in a ventilator.
And that one does not let him kind of die slowly and humanely.
That's kind of where we are in Gaza because there are no medical supplies, barely any medical supplies.
A lot of people die here.
There are injuries of people that could in the West, by the Western standards, could be saved.
But here they cannot be saved because they have to go on a priority list, which is really, really heartbreaking.
No Water or Supplies 00:03:31
If there is a full-scale invasion of Rafah, as Prime Minister Netanyahu has indicated there will be, what do you fear may happen?
Disaster.
Absolute disaster.
Last, yesterday night, actually, or yesterday evening, I went and drove into Al-Mawasi area west of Khan Yunis.
I wish if I could share these pictures with you.
Literally, all the way to the horizon, tents everywhere, any direction you look.
You see hundreds, actually thousands and thousands and thousands of tents everywhere with families left stranded without water, without proper shelter.
And Piers, let me kind of tell you how reality is really on the ground at these camps.
A lot of people in the West in America, like where I come from, think that when Israel says we've evacuated Eastern Rafah, the first thing that comes to mind, you know, you give them warnings and you send them, you know, air-conditioned buses, they board the buses and they go into these evacuation areas in Al-Mawasi.
And by the time you get there, you have these beautiful tents lined up with sanitary facilities waiting for you.
That's not true.
I mean, what we have, we had to run from our safe house that's no longer safe, literally under the bombardment of the Israeli army.
We just gathered our stuff and ran out of this house, which is a typical Palestinian experience.
We did it twice, our presence in our stay here in Gaza.
The Palestinians have done it more than seven or eight times in the past seven months.
And when they get to Al-Mawasi, it's a desert.
It's really a sandy land, empty land, where people carry their belongings on the back of a car or a truck or a donkey.
They just dump it there and they start figuring out what's next.
First, no water.
You don't have tents because the supplies are not allowed in.
And so they have to figure out how to create a shelter.
And the problem is, if to buy a tent in Gaza today costs more than $1,000 to $2,000 because you can't find it.
No organization gives you 10.
There are some in the past, but currently none.
So you go with your family of five, six, ten children and your wife in the middle of absolutely nowhere.
You don't know where the water is.
And I've seen it with my own eyes.
And I'm more than happy to shake.
I actually see it on our Instagram page, I'm Python Scientific, that we posted or will be posted very soon.
What people do, they dig a hole in the ground because they are near the beach.
So the water table is very shallow, just about two meters deep, and then water comes out.
So people collect that water and use it for drinking, washing, for everything.
But the water is brown.
It's not, it's brackish water.
And for them to go get fresh water, they have sometimes to walk to two to three miles to find it.
And if they find it, sometimes they have to pay for it.
And it's very expensive.
So things have done 10 and 15 times in price, almost in everything in Gaza.
Just to give you a simple example, for my team, for us to fill our cars with gasoline, with gas, one gallon of gas in Gaza cost $100.
This is what we pay as an organization, $100 per gallon of gas.
Apply this to everything.
I don't like to describe this as a war.
I like to describe it as madness, absolute madness.
Absolute Madness in Gaza 00:02:33
Have you seen any evidence of Hamas either in Rafah or Khanis?
I hope you believe me if I tell you I haven't even seen a police in Gaza, which is also another shocking experience because you would expect in such circumstances, in the absence of police, that you will see chaos.
People are killing each other, but the crime rate in Gaza remains very low because people support each other and they kind of go through this tough experience together.
We've been in Gaza.
This is our second mission.
So several weeks now in Gaza.
Personally, this is my second week.
I have not seen, and none of my medical team members have seen any form of militants, either at the hospital or otherwise.
All what we receive at the hospital are injured and killed civilians.
And when I say civilians, I like to stress that they are families, a mother, a father, their children, injuries.
One of the latest cases that we had to work on, a young man in his 20s, came in still breathing, but in a state of a shock.
So the team tried to resuscitate him, but then they failed and they decided to actually crack his chest open.
And again, I'm sorry about the graphic description of the situation.
And then they could not actually save him.
So heartbreaking, absolutely horrific.
I mean, honestly, I've seen so many things in my life.
I was there looking after five minutes.
I personally felt dizzy.
I just could not handle it.
Let me ask you, Dr. Nasser, just finally, I mean, it takes a lot of courage to go to somewhere like that, knowing what may be coming imminently.
What is it that motivates you to risk your own life to be there?
I think we are at unprecedented time in history, Piers.
And every member of my team would like to be part of it.
That's something we will talk to our children and grandchildren about what happened in Gaza.
It feels like a day of judgment to many.
For the Palestinians, it's an endless, endless suffering for absolutely a crime that they have not committed.
1.2 1.5 million people, almost 2.2 million people are put in inhumane conditions like no other maybe that history has ever seen and will ever see.
Israel's Failed Strategy 00:11:13
And this madness has to stop.
Dr. Massam Nasser, thank you very much indeed for taking the time from that incredibly busy environment you're operating in.
I really do appreciate it.
I want to wish you and your team all the very best and stay as safe as you can, given how dangerous it clearly is.
But I thank you on behalf of everyone watching this for the service that you're doing for the people there.
Thank you, Piers.
Well, to debate, I'm joined from New York by Professor Norman Finkelstein, political scientist and pro-Palestine activist, and from Efrad and the West Bank by Ishai Fleischer, the spokesman for Jewish community of Hebron, and Minister Ben Geveer's former advisor for international affairs.
Well, welcome to both of you.
Dr. Finkelstein, let me start with you, if I may.
We are on the verge, it seems, of an inevitable full-scale invasion of Rafah.
Prime Minister Netanyahu has made that clear.
It's also clear that America, Israel's biggest and most powerful ally, is extremely concerned about this.
In fact, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has said not only does he think it's a big mistake for Israel to do this, but he believes that the war on Hamas is not really working, that Hamas is now regrouping in the north anyway.
And so on every level, from the American assessment, this is something that shouldn't be happening.
What's your response?
Well, I can't speak to the military situation because I have no professional knowledge of it.
I can't speak to the humanitarian situation.
The International Crisis Group, a very respected mainstream organization, put out a report about three weeks ago in which it says there is no middle ground.
If there is an invasion of Rafah, there's going to be mass hunger, mass starvation in at least northern Gaza and perhaps elsewhere.
And they were emphatic about the fact that you have to make a choice, either suspend the invasion or accept that you're going to cost the lives of thousands and perhaps more than thousands of civilians in Gaza.
The second point I would make is that at least as of the last few days, the Under Secretary for Humanitarian Affairs, Martin Griffins, has said that no aid is coming through to Gaza anymore, that Rafah has been shut down, that Karam Shalom has been shut down,
and that Gaza is now in a position where it was a few weeks ago when Israel was effectively not omitting any humanitarian aid to Gaza.
So at a humanitarian level, should there be a full-scale, there is an invasion right now and large numbers of people, I guess the current estimate is 300,000.
Large numbers of people have been displaced, displaced where is unclear because it's unclear where to go.
But if there's a full-scale invasion touching the core of the Rafah refugee population, then one can, at least according to the International Crisis Group, expect mega-deaths.
Isha Fleischer, I watched Dr. Phil's interview with Prime Minister Netanyahu last night, and he was emphatic, Netanyahu, that there would be no stopping Israel going into Rafah and that they had to do this because Hamas had to be eliminated.
But it would seem from American intelligence that Hamas is already regrouping in the north of Gaza, which surely should be of significant concern to Israel, shouldn't it?
If the strategy is simply not working and Hamas is regrouping now in areas that were thought to have been places where Hamas had been removed, doesn't that suggest this military strategy is not working?
First thing, Piers, I want to thank you so much for having me on the show.
And I also want to use this opportunity to wish Israel a happy 76th Independence Day.
Tonight we celebrate that.
Israel is the most exciting project of the Jewish people in 2,000 years.
So this is a big deal for us.
Today was Memorial Day.
Now it's Independence Day.
And so, you know, I really appreciate the chance to speak about these things with you today on your important show.
With regarding to Gaza and the Hamas War, okay, so we're going to have to fight them in Rafah.
And if we have to fight them in the north, we'll do that as well.
We're in a war.
We're in a war.
We're not here to just give it up right now just because it's not working here or there.
We're at a war with people who have dug tunnels 15 stories deep, people who want to destroy the state of Israel.
That is their charter.
It's a religious charter.
They say that they want to get rid of all of Israel, starting with Gaza.
And if we have to pivot to the north, we'll do that.
The Jewish people are used to conflict.
We've been through a lot of conflicts throughout our history, 3,000 years of conflicts, but we're still here.
So if we have to go north, we'll go north.
What follows from your question is not that we should just give up and not attack in the south.
It just means that we'll have to move on our attack north.
And we're going to deal with this thing because we have no other option.
And I want to remind you, Piers, that it's a proxy war as well.
If we lose this thing, we're going to lose it to the Iranians who just declared that they have a nuclear bomb.
We have to fight this.
We have to prosecute this war to the end and send the signal to the Middle East that we're not joking around.
Okay, let me play you, Anthony Blinklin, Secretary of State, what he had to say on the weekend shows in America.
We're seeing parts of Gaza that Israel has cleared of Hamas where Hamas is coming back, including in the north, including in Con Yunus.
As we look at Rafah, they may go in and have some initial success, but potentially at an incredibly high cost to civilians, but one that is not durable, one that's not sustainable.
And they will be left holding the bag on an enduring insurgency because a lot of armed Hamas will be left, no matter what they do in Rafah.
Or if they leave and get out of Gaza, as we believe they need to do, then you're going to have a vacuum and a vacuum that's likely to be filled by chaos, by anarchy, and ultimately by Hamas again.
Now, Ishai Fleischer, the problem is America is, as I said, is Israel's biggest ally by far, also biggest supplier of military hardware, which President Biden's already said he's going to stop a lot of that going to Israel if they go into Rafah.
But to have the Secretary of State of the United States expressing such concern about the military strategy, surely that has to concern you, doesn't it?
Because ultimately, if you kill all these innocent civilians in the process of getting rid of Hamas, but you end up not getting rid of Hamas, that is a failed war, isn't it?
Okay, so first thing with regarding to civilians, we have to remember that civilian deaths is actually part of Hamas's strategy against us.
They want Israel to kill a lot of civilians so that Piers Morgan can ask, hey, what's going on with the civilians?
So that the Anthony Blinkens can give Israel a hard time.
So that is in their interests.
They are actually going against the Geneva Convention's stated laws that you're not supposed to put in civilians in front of the people.
But Israel is also killing.
Israel is also killing thousands of civilians.
You accept that?
Yes, we are, because we're in a war.
We're in a war.
And we basically, it's like this, Pierce.
If we don't do it, then basically we are sending the war on to the next generation.
We're just passing the buck.
We're kicking the can down the road.
It means that my children are going to have to prosecute the next war.
We've already seen that.
We've already had many wars with Gaza.
This is like war number what, like five.
So if we don't take care of this business, they're going to come stronger at us.
They're going to declare victory.
We can't have that.
We can't have Iran be victorious in Gaza as it has been in Yemen, as it has been in Iraq, as it has been in South Lebanon.
We can't have that.
So this time, October 7th is an opportunity to clean house and to make sure this doesn't come back again.
Now, people on the more right-wing part of the spectrum believe that Israel should actually hold on to Gaza and have minimally a military presence there, if not more.
Because if we just back out of there, what happens is the next Hamas or the next evolution of Hamas will take over.
So, yeah, Piers, bottom line is it's a war, and we've got to fight it.
Norman Finkelstein, Ishai Fleischer said this.
I wonder if I can briefly respond to that.
Yes, you can, yeah.
Thank you so much.
I think there's a bit of a misnomer here by designating what Israel's aim is to simply defeat, impose a major military defeat on Hamas.
I have no doubt that that's correct.
However, I do believe that what you're describing, quoting Anthony Blinken, as a failed strategy is only half correct because Israel has another goal.
The goal is to finally solve the Gaza question for once and for all.
As the other person said, there have been many high-tech Israeli massacres in Gaza.
It's actually quite a large number, more than five, but I won't bother with the figure.
And the goal right now is not just to mow the lawn in Gaza, but to extirpate, pull out from the roots every blade of grass in Gaza.
That is to say, to make Gaza unlivable.
And in terms of that goal, which is separate and discrete from the goal of inflicting a military defeat on Hamas, that goal is coming close to achievement.
They have made the north of Gaza and they have made central Gaza unlivable.
Those landscapes can now be described as a howling wilderness.
The only area of Gaza which is not physically unlivable, that is the only area that has not been completely reduced to rubble, the only area is Rafa.
And so when Prime Minister Netanyahu says he wants to finish the job in Rafah, that, in my opinion, yes, it does include a component of trying to defeat Hamas.
But the bigger goal, in my opinion, judging from what the Israelis have said, their bigger goal is to make Gaza an unlivable place.
Making Gaza Unlivable 00:14:49
And so the people of Gaza, in the words of Israel's former head of the National Security Council, Giora Island, the only choice that will be left to the people of Gaza will be either to stay and starve or to leave.
You know, Lindsey Graham, the American senator, gave an interview also at the weekend.
I want to play a clip from that, Norman, and come back to you for your response to this, because he raises an interesting point.
Why is it okay?
Can I say this?
Why is it okay for America to drop two nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end their existential threat war?
Why was it okay for us to do that?
I thought it was okay.
To Israel, do whatever you have to do to survive as a Jewish state.
Again, military officials say everybody has changed.
But let me ask you about how these military officials that you're talking about.
Let me ask you something.
I mean, strong words there.
Now, I think it's been misinterpreted as him saying that he wants Israel to use nuclear weapons.
He didn't say that.
What he was saying was, if it was deemed morally acceptable, as many felt it was, albeit horrendous death toll, but to end the war morally defensible for America to deploy nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then why is it not morally defensible for Israel to do whatever it needs to do to eliminate the threat of Hamas, given that Hamas is on record after October the 7th, they're saying they wish to do the same thing again and again and again,
and have a charter which, when it was first written, said their obligation was to get rid of all the Jews.
I think there are a couple of aspects to that question.
The first aspect is I don't think there is a broad consensus outside the United States, leaving the U.S. apart.
I don't think there is a broad consensus that it was morally acceptable to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In particular, you could say that the Hiroshima question is debatable, but I don't believe anybody seriously argues that Nagasaki was morally or morally defensive.
Let me not get too much into World War II.
Let's talk about our situation now.
Yes, that's fine.
There are serious things to deal with right now.
That's fine.
Let's get to it.
Right, I'm trying to be real.
Let's not get into academic mumbo-jumbo.
I understand, but let's get to it.
The bottom line is that Israel is a tiny country.
And if you look at the maps, Hiroshima is directly.
It's a tiny, tiny Jewish state within...
That's right, but we've got to get to it and not talk about Nagasaki or Hiroshima.
What's the difference?
The point is we're a tiny Jewish state within the Arab Muslim world.
We don't defend ourselves, then we're an ethnic minority.
We're an armed ethnic minority.
Let Norman Finkelstein respond, please.
Pierce, you have to decide whether you're the moderator or he's the moderator.
No, I'm the moderator.
Ask me your question directly.
Okay, well, then I'm trying to be responsive to your question.
Yeah, I understand.
So now on the question of Israel and Gaza, either you do or you don't accept the laws of war, what's called international humanitarian law.
If you do accept the laws of war, then Israel has to abide by those laws of war.
And the fundamental law of war is called the principle of distinction.
You have to distinguish between targeting civilians and targeting combatants.
So I don't believe Lindsey Graham is correct, except if in his opinion, he said Israel has to do what it has to do.
That's his essential argument.
But that means, as I understand him, Israel doesn't have any obligation to obey the laws of war.
Let me just say on that, Norman.
Just to clarify, he wasn't advocating that Israel should break international law.
He didn't say that.
And I would throw back at you, I guess, this point, which is do you now, well, maybe you have always done, but do you accept that Hamas broke international law, given that it was the governing body of Gaza at the time, that when it committed the act of atrocity with this terror attack on October the 7th, that was a breach of international law.
You accept that?
I would say there are two aspects to that question.
Under international law, there is no law on preventing people living under an occupation from resisting that occupation using armed force.
Under international law, for God's sake, it is on record stating that he was jovial at that time.
I will let you respond.
Just let him finish the point.
I'll come to you.
Let's get to it.
However, in the course of its armed resistance to the illegal Israeli occupation of Gaza, it broke the laws of war to the extent that it targeted civilians.
And the evidence thus far indicates that massive atrocities occurred on October 7th.
However, we have to distinguish that, which was clearly a breach of international law, from the right of a people under occupation to use armed force to end the occupation.
Okay, let me go to Isha's slideshow.
I mean, on that point, do you agree with Norman Finkelstein's assessment of what happened there?
First thing, October 7th was a horrific massacre.
There's no international law that's going to back that.
But we know, and you had this on your show, we know that Norman Finkelstein celebrated the murder of Jews.
He's on record.
You tested him.
You saw that he was not telling you the whole truth.
You know, he said, I, for one, will never begrudge.
It warms every fiber of my soul.
The scenes of Gaza smiling children as the arrogant Jewish supremacist oppressors have finally been humbled.
So forget international law.
He's happy that Jews were murdered.
You know, that there was some soldiers that they were murdered.
Their male members were cut off and put in their mouth.
And then the terrorists took out the phones and sent pictures of that to their mothers.
All right, what are we talking about here?
Let's get back to common sense.
We have a war here against an intractable enemy that wants to destroy Israel.
Even President Biden, who's not a big fan of this war, has already said that Israel has not done atrocities, is not committing a genocide.
That's already passe.
Even Norman Finkelstein's beloved ICJ basically did not go into saying that Israel is doing atrocities.
They kind of bunted and said, please be careful in the future.
That's it.
So now we're fighting an intractable enemy.
As I said before, it's a proxy war as well.
And it's not an occupation.
Very sadly, my nation, Israel, in 2005 gave away land.
We lived.
I was there.
I was there with Arabs.
I was there with Arabs and Jews in Gaza in 2005 when my army came, the Israeli army came and took us out of there.
The Arabs there begged us, begged us.
I still remember their hands through the fences, like this.
They said, don't leave.
You don't understand who's going to take over.
Now, what Norman Finkelstein is going to tell you is that all day long Israel is committing atrocities.
If you go to Telegram, you could see the videos of Hamas shooting civilians and women yelling, you have destroyed our lives.
You have destroyed our land.
You have killed our children.
Hamas is a cynical organization.
Its leaders are billionaires.
Its whole thing is to make Israel look bad.
It has no care for its own civilians.
It steals the food that comes there.
There's been thousands of tons of food that has come there.
Okay, but they steal it.
They keep it for themselves.
So what are we talking about?
Let's just get back to common sense.
We have a terrorist organization.
It's controlling a piece of land.
We're fighting them, trying to minimize civilian casualties.
But yeah, it is war.
It is war and we're fighting it.
Yes, they are putting their children in front of our munitions on purpose.
And that is a very sad situation.
But we cannot stop prosecuting this war.
For us, it's existential.
We are a tiny ethnic minority in this region.
Okay, you're tiny in geographical size.
You are enormously powerful, actually, in terms of military power and in terms of political power.
And you see what happens.
And you have your number one ally.
The United States of America, which is the most powerful superpower in the world.
In January this year, your former boss, Ben Gavir, argued that the departure of Palestinians and re-establishment of Israeli settlements is a correct, just, moral, and humane solution to this war.
I mean, that cannot be right, surely.
I mean, the solution to long-term peace is not going to come down, surely, to Israel filling Gaza with Israelis.
I mean, that would surely cross a line which nobody would think could be remotely achievable in terms of a sustained peace.
This is a big question, Pierce, and a good one, an important one, which is really a much bigger question about how do we move forward.
First thing is, we have a war with the jihad.
We don't have a war with Arabs.
We don't have a war with Palestinians.
We have a war with jihadists.
Jihadists, they control the landscape because they're very violent.
Mostly they're violent against their own people.
I know this firsthand from Hebron.
I cannot tell you how many examples I have of Arabs that want to make peace and relations with Hebron.
I have excellent relations with many Arabs in Hebron, and yet they are persecuted by the Palestinian Authority in Gaza by Hamas.
Why?
Because they want to move forward in normalization with Israel.
Israel wants to normalize in this region.
At the end, we are not very different than the Arabs.
We have a similar DNA.
We have a similar language.
We have a similar religion.
We're the children of Abraham.
And some people are recognizing that that's the way forward.
That's the Abraham Accords.
Okay, that's the UAE in Morocco, maybe even Saudi Arabia in the future, in the near future, I hope.
We have a way forward.
And the way forward is a way of peace.
What is peace?
A strong Israel on its land, on its ancestral homeland, surrounded by Arab states on their lands.
And those states together working forward for the, working together to make the Abrahamic region successful and thriving.
But there are elements that are jihadist elements.
These elements want to undermine that.
They want to destroy normalization.
They're against Israel.
They're also against moderate Arabs.
They're against Christian Arabs, Arameans.
When I speak to non-Jewish residents and citizens of Israel, like Druze, like Cherkesi, like Arameans, like Bedouins, like pro-Israel Muslims, they all say the same thing to me.
You have to be strong against the jihad.
You've got to crush it, or else it's going to take over.
It first and foremost crushes the average Arab, the average decent person who wants to normalize with Israel.
So the answer is like this.
Fight with the jihad.
Be bad to the jihad so that you can be good to the good people.
That's the way forward.
It's not to be wishy-washy, to back up.
Let me go to Norman Finkelstein.
Your response to that proposal.
I'm not sure what the proposal is.
What I hear is a lot of statements that seem to be completely detached from reality, at least as I understand it.
Let's start with one of his earlier statements.
He said in 2005, when Israel was redeploying its troops from inside Gaza to the periphery of Gaza, the people of Gaza were begging the settlers to stay.
There were approximately 8,000 settlers in Gaza at that point, and they controlled about 30% of the land.
The 2 million Palestinians in Gaza were given about 70% of the land at that particular moment.
Number two, I just want you to know about my experience with Israel's national...
I was there.
They talked to me.
Sir, sir.
I was there.
You really have to act as Piers.
Many of these Israelis think the whole world is the West Bank in Gaza where they get to control everything.
So you really have to remind me that this is a very important thing.
I told you that you want Israel to stay and be strong.
Don't change the topic.
It's very simple.
I just said to you, I was there.
I saw them with my own eyes.
They talked to me.
They said, don't give up this land.
And the same thing that Bedouin said, don't give up the sign of Israel.
Let Norman finish.
Because he listened to you.
Just to clear it.
Norman did let you speak and then responded afterwards.
Afford him the same courtesy.
You got it.
So at the point where, according to the other speaker, the people of Gaza were begging the Israelis to stay, according to the head of the National Security Council at the time, Giora Ailan, and this is March 2004, he described Gaza as, quote, a huge concentration camp.
So I find it a little bit far-fetched to believe that the innovation is...
Please don't interrupt.
Have you read anybody else?
Like one guy, that's the guy that's writing over and over again.
Please let him finish.
Sorry.
Sure.
So I find it a little bit far-fetched that the inmates of a concentration camp would be begging for the guards to stay in the camp.
That to me is an unusual scenario.
Now, this talk about the people, Israelis establishing, re-establishing illegal settlements in the illegally occupied Gaza Strip, that to me, there is a problem there.
I was reading an interview yesterday with an expert on the subject.
Israel has deposited, as of now, there are about 37 million tons, 37 million tons of destruction,
about 37 million tons in Gaza right now, which means it would take, according to this expert, it would take about 10 years to clear the rubble in Gaza before you can even get to the city.
Ten Years to Clear Rubble 00:14:51
We will clean it up again.
Don't worry.
We're going to clean up Gaza because we're going to be able to do it.
We're going to reconstruct it.
We're going to make it beautiful again.
Make Gaza beautiful again.
That's the problem.
Don't worry about it.
We'll take care of it.
Thank you very much.
You'll probably have to...
It's not for you, we live here.
This is the International Committee.
Well, actually, on the subject of living there, I did spend quite a lot of time between 1987 and 1993 in Al-Khalil, which is sometimes called Hebron.
And it's, again, rather far-fetched.
It's 44,000 years.
Right.
Well, it's Al-Khalil.
Okay, go ahead.
Al-Khalil is the very far-fetched.
It came about about 1,400 years ago.
It's been Hevron for 4,000 years.
Jews have been living there for 3,600, 30, 700 years.
You see, you have a problem, sir.
The problem is you want to discard what the international community has to say in the subject.
Under international law...
I'm very, very to plug it in.
There's many people in the international community that are with us.
If it's Ghird Wilders in Amsterdam, if it's President Trump who recognized the legality of Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria, certainly in Hebron, we've been there for 3,500 years.
I think somewhere in international law, they could figure out our rights in this ancestral city.
Right.
Under international law, the whole of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and Gaza, are occupied Palestinian territories.
So under international law, I should say under the Congress.
We should live there.
And nothing is going to stop us.
Under the International Criminal Court Rome statute, sir, you're a war criminal because you are illegally settling in occupied Palestinian territory.
You should be prosecuted under international law as a war criminal.
That is the same.
That's the law.
That's the law.
That is not the law.
That is not the law.
Well, no, actually, actually, as Benny Morris said about you, Finkelstein is a notorious distorter of facts and of my work, not a serious or honest historian, right?
It's on your Wikipedia page.
So, do me a favor: you're not going to tell me exactly what the law is.
You're not even a lawyer.
I'm a lawyer, and it happens to be that we have every right to live in our ancestral homeland.
Excuse me, we won that land in defense of wars, which is an international law principle.
We purchased the land, which is the simplest principle of free markets.
We bought it from Arabs.
The three religions all recognize the Jewish people as living in this land.
If it's the Quran, the Christian New Testament, the Torah, they all recognize us as from this land.
But what nobody, Ishai, if I may jump in, what people are not accepting are the continuing attempts by Israelis to expand the settlements.
Almost nobody I speak to thinks that that is anything but a deeply inflammatory thing to begin.
Can I remind you again, Pierce?
Pierce, this is our little white.
You know, you don't need to because when I went to the end, okay, listen, let me explain.
Hang on, Pierce.
Let me explain.
When I went to Jerusalem about 12 years ago and interviewed Prime Minister Netanyahu in Jerusalem, he showed me a very similar map that was hanging behind his desk.
And he put his thumb on Israel and he put his hand on all the much larger Arab countries.
I get it.
I get it.
But what it doesn't show is the reality that Israel is the most powerful country in that region in terms of its military and certainly in terms of its support from the United States.
So this idea that it's a tiny impoverished little part of land is a mischaracterization.
But my question to you again, Ishai, is this.
Pierce, it's not a history.
How does it help?
I never said it.
Hang on, let me finish.
I never said that.
Let me ask you the question again.
Go ahead.
Which is, how do you justify the expansion of settlements, given that almost nobody I've spoken to on this show thinks that this is nothing but inflammatory?
Oh my gosh, Pierce, for God's sake, first thing I never said the word impoverished.
We're a powerful little country.
Great.
But look what happens when we drop our guard for one minute.
They cream us.
Let's be real about what happened.
We got creamed, and now we're fighting a war to fix that wrong that happened.
Okay, that's number one.
Number two is Judea and Samaria, the West Bank, so-called, is the heartland of the Jewish people.
It's where we're from.
Our whole DNA, everything, our language is based on these places.
We're from these places.
This was called the Jewish state 2,500 years ago by the Persian Empire.
It's called Yehud Medinta, Der Yudenstadt, the Jewish state.
This is the heart of our land.
Yes, Israel has not formally annexed Judea and Samaria, but it holds on to it as territories.
There's 500,000 Jews, so-called settlers like myself, who proudly live in the ancestral homeland.
This is where we're from.
This is where we're going to stay.
Nothing is going to get us out.
And no amount of international law, mumbo-jumbo, no amount of academic gobbledygook is going to get rid of simple plain history.
And many people, including the Trump administration, recognized our rights.
So we're talking about big America.
You've said to me now on the show three times, said to me, you know, America is against this war.
There's many Americas.
Right now, it's a Biden America.
Tomorrow it might be a Trump America.
A Trump America recognizes our right.
So we're going to be patient, as we have been for 3,000 years.
We're going to be strong, continue to build our third commonwealth, which is celebrating 76 years of independence today, Mazaltov, Mazaltov, we say.
And we're going to keep going.
So don't give me this stuff about that we're not going to live in Hebron.
Hebron is where we're from.
Our forefathers are going to be able to do that.
And do you believe?
Okay, but that's where we're going.
Before I go to Norman for a response to that, do you believe then that a natural extension of your logic is that you should also be entitled to the whole of Gaza going forward?
Is that your belief?
That actually do you believe that is all Israeli land?
Absolutely.
Pierce is one of the people.
Wait, wait, let me finish.
You asked a big question.
That's some hassle.
You asked a big question.
It needs a real answer.
That's right.
And it's a fair question.
You're right.
And the answer is simple.
2005 disengagement was an awful mistake.
We should control that land and govern it.
Again, it's a tiny piece of our tiny land.
And of course, pro-Israel, non-jihadist Arabs and others, Palestinians, Muslims, whatever they want to be, that don't hate Israel should live there and be successful there.
But what right?
Sorry, I'm sorry, but listen.
Sorry, but what right does Israel have to just take over Gaza, having obliterated it?
There was never a problem.
Yes, you can defend your.
Listen.
No.
You can defend yourself against a terror attack.
This surely is exactly the kind of occupation that Norman was talking about, only on a massive bigger scale.
You're unashamed about it.
You want to occupy Gaza.
You're not talking today.
You're not talking today to one of the liberal Jews.
You're not talking to a government spokesman.
Clearly.
You're talking to one of the settlers.
Right.
I am talking to you about what we think is right, what we think makes sense also in terms of how to manage the situation.
But the problem is, Isha.
If you give up your land to the people who are they attack you.
Yes, but the problem is you are sounding genocidal in the sense that you want to get rid of it.
What?
Genocidal.
Did you not hear me say to Pierce?
Pierce, I respect you tremendously.
So don't put silly words in my mouth.
You know, really, truthfully, I watch you and I love your work and you open things up for a lot of people.
Don't say silly things.
That was very silly.
I never said anything about genocide.
Holding on to a piece of land, holding on to minorities.
Every power in this world has minorities inside of it.
Every country that's a big country has other minorities, other peoples inside of it.
Did I say we should genocide the Arabs?
We have a fight with the jihad.
I said, and it's on tape, I hope you play it.
I said that minorities that are non-jihadists, that are pro-Israel, are going to be successful in this land.
Again, that's what's going on.
Again, I was simply asking.
Genocide.
What right of this is?
Isaiah, what right does Israel have to occupy Gaza after this?
I don't think you have that right.
It is our historic homeland.
Look it up in Wikipedia.
You'll see what is the Jewish story in this place.
It was ours 3,000 years ago.
It was ours 2,000 years ago.
Herod built whole cities in Gaza.
One of the most ancient mosques in Gaza was before that.
It's the synagogue.
It's our ancestral lands.
Let me go to Norman.
Norman, you've been waiting patiently.
Your response to this, where Isha has made it absolutely crystal clear he believes that there should be a complete occupation of Gaza by Israel.
No, not an occupation, a sovereignty, an Israeli sovereignty.
Well, it's the same thing.
Certainly, first of the military war, the first step.
Norman.
I would say that I would say he has one thing correct, and that is I agree with the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, the organization known as Beth Salim, which stated about a year ago that actually de facto, there is only one state.
There's only one state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, and that one state is based on the principle of Jewish, and that one state is based on the principle of Jewish supremacy.
And what Bethselem wrote in that was that what Bethselem Piers, as I said, there are some Israelis who get confused and think the whole world is the West Bank in Gaza.
I wish you would remind him that we're having the civil conversation here, and I have the right to respond.
Yes, you do.
You do.
Thank you so much.
So, within that one state, namely between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, As Bet Selim said, it's effectively an apartheid state where the Jews have, in that state, the Jews have privileges and rights which are denied to Palestinians.
In the case of Israel, they're second-class citizens.
In the case of the West Bank, they have no rights whatsoever apart from those that they're given under international law.
Let's say they don't have the right, the essential right, to vote.
In the case of Gaza, since roughly, you can say 1991, they've been immured in a, effectively, as Guillara Eilen put it, they've been immured in a concentration camp.
And now the question is, how do you resolve that situation?
And there are three possibilities.
You can try to just subordinate that Palestinian population forever.
That's one possibility.
A second possibility is you can make Gaza and the West Bank uninhabitable and help the people, by hook or by crook, leave.
And the third possibility, as you put it, was genocide or as Prime Minister Netanyahu.
There's no possibility that Arabs can live in Israel?
Is that what you're telling me?
No, I think Arabs cannot live in Israel.
That's it.
The only answer is genocide.
You can't have 2 million Arab citizens in Israel.
It's only genocide.
It's the only option.
That is just hot air.
I don't care.
There's no truth of the matter.
It's just TV bluster.
Okay, let's go.
So if your other guest is saying that he would accept the slogan in South Africa, one person, one vote.
If that's his position, I think that's a reasonable position.
But he should be clear about that, since half the population between the Mediterranean and the Jordan is Palestinian Arab, and likely given current birth rates, the majority between the Mediterranean and the Jordan will be Palestinian Arabs.
Is your other guest stating, and this would be useful for your audience, is your other guest stating that he supports one person, one vote between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, and he accepts that the majority over time will be Palestinian Arab.
Does he accept that?
Okay, Ishai?
Fabulous.
Thank you very much.
First thing, Norman, again, my name is Ishai.
It's easy to remember.
But in any case, I remember your name.
Isn't that nice?
I want to tell you that finally you got to something serious because you now say there is an option other than genocide to actually become citizens of the state of Israel.
Okay, we can talk about it.
I wrote an article in the New York Times called A Settler's Vision for the Future of Israel.
I outlined five alternatives to the two-state solution.
I talked about pathway to citizenship.
I talked about residency.
I talked about Israeli Arabs or so-called Palestinians having a right to vote in the next door Palestinian state called Jordan, remaining here as residents, but actually voting in their country, Jordan, right next door.
I laid out a lot of options.
And those options are to be discussed.
As I understand this, very happy.
I'm very happy, Norman, that you were able to reach a conclusion that there's an option other than genocide and that Arabs can actually live within.
But I want to ask you, Norman, just remind me, how many Arab democracies are in the United States?
I don't ask for the right to vote in Canada.
I'm an American citizen.
I don't ask for the right to vote next door in elections in Canada.
What I was asking is Smoking in South Africa of one person, one vote for the entire population between the Mediterranean and the Jordan.
That seems to me the democratic solution to discuss, and that is at least at least, you know, I'll tell you the truth, Norman.
That one I accept as being a reasonable proposal.
I don't like that proposal, but I accept that at least being the starting point as opposed to the farce that you said before, which is that there's only Genesis.
Gentlemen, you know, Jewish people are going to live here, Pierce.
Given it's taken us about 45 minutes.
It's taken us 45 minutes, but we finally got to a place where there was at least a tiny fragment of agreement, which seems to me a sensible place to leave this debate.
But thank you both very much indeed for, as always, giving both sides in a strident way.
And I think the viewers will learn a lot from that.
And I appreciate you both joining me.
Thank you.
Thank you, Piers.
Export Selection